While there’s a lot of things I’ve had and lost over the years. Some artifacts I’ve kept but never really looked at.
Here’s a poem (with corrected spelling):
While raccoons run up trees
Spider webs are being made
While pigs roll in mud
Otters swim in the sea
That’s from a very yellowed piece of notebook paper in my drawings. The heading reads “Joseph Crawford, Age 6.”
Kids in the US start Kindergarten at age 5. I did. Halfway through that grade I was “skipped a grade” to first. It’s a decision I don’t remember being made. My parents regretted taking that decision, in fact my father will still call that a wrong decision. It’s a thing that was foundational. But I’ve never really written about it.
What is there to say? I was younger than other kids, I was less mature in every grade. It was hard, emotionally. I was a year behind at puberty as a teen, naive and confused, often. I drove a car a year after all my peers.
But I think the thing that I internalized that mattered far more was being told I was so smart. I viewed intelligence and achievement as things that just “happened” rather than things to be worked on. I did not understand the value of applied effort.
So what’s the deal on that poem? It seems like a grammar exercise. How to use “while,” maybe. I wish I had more context on it. I think it’s something my mother saved and I added to my box of old artworks – Christmas cards, drawings, cartoons. There’s a lot of stuff in here. But there’s a lot missing too. I had a storage space in Moorpark that was broken into years ago and lost some notebooks I assembled in the 1990s. I am pretty sure my submission to The New Yorker was in there. I also kept the the rejection letter, which was very kind to 18 year old me. I was crushed and young me interpreted that single rejection of a few cartoons that made me laugh as a FINAL VERDICT that I would never be a cartoonist of any sort.
In the intervening 30-some years I developed a more proportional sense of what creative rejection means. Websites have been a creative outlet, as have drawings. I’ve contributed work that appeared in other media outlets. I’m still proud of having gotten an autobiographical comic into a literary journal.
In 2004 I was still figuring it out. Here’s what I wrote then, after failing to complete an assignment in a Java class I otherwise did great in:
But it depressed the hell out of me last week. I had a hard time reconciling myself to this mistake. I am struggling to recognize that a mistake I make is not me. In my mind, a mistake = me. When I get a zero, I AM A ZERO. This thinking is not rational, though it has spurred me to excel in many areas. But from a mental health point of view, I can’t see that it’s terrible constructive. Finding that balance — between trying to be a high achiever, and being an emotionally well-balanced person — is something I’m looking at more.
I’ve not written about skipping a grade. I mentioned it in that post along with a lot of other post-divorce thinking. At age 12 I read a little sidebar piece in OMNI about child prodigies who burn out and it resonated so much I saved it for 39 years in my papers. I posted it to my blog and I recycled that clipping I’d been dragging around.
It may sound like a cliche to start anew every day – but in a very real sense that’s precisely the opportunity we have. We must reckon with our pasts, but past performance is no guarantee of future results. And that disclaimer works in both positive and negative senses. This insight is only inside me because I’ve cultivated it. I have done work in therapy. I’ve participated in a few flavors of support groups. And I have been lucky enough to have friends with whom I can be vulnerable and truthful. It’s useful to know myself.
A few times in IndieWeb Zooms I’ve mentioned how much I believe failure is a great teacher. When folks point out that I seem to know “everything” I point out how untrue that is. I can admit to being knowledgeable, but I must also admit that knowing a subject always starts with not knowing anything about it. There’s no shame in admitting ones limitations. That admission can be the start of smarts galore.
I do love my story of The Worst Job Interview I Ever Went On In My Life. It was in 1997. I had been building some websites. I’d taken courses at UCLA Extension on graphic design and multimedia. I had learned a lot. I thought I knew everything.
The Worst Job Interview was in Venice, California. I was so proud of my resume, all I had learned. I interviewed with an agency that specialized in placing creatives – graphic designers, print designers, multimedia designers, web designers. As they asked me about my experience and what I’d built, it became clear how little I knew. My experience with QuarkXPress was limited. I couldn’t explain how to hand-write HTML. I couldn’t articulate the differences between graphical formats. I didn’t really understand how web servers. All of it was professional and kind. Utterly matter-of fact.
I walked out of that interview dispirited and depressed.
But also…
I walked out of that interview with a laundry list of things I might want to learn more about.
Within a year I had made the career transition from respiratory therapist to doing work making websites.
That learning process has never ended.
one comment so far...
I like this a lot — I’ve gone down what felt like a number of creative “dead ends” this year, and thinking of starting over every day is a lot like what I’ve been working on for myself